Saturday, February 5, 2011

McClatchy has a good piece about the debate over the use of the word "war" to describe Mexico's conflict. Indeed, it's worthy of a discussion:

Calderon himself has never used the word war. He prefers "lucha contra el crimen organizado" or "lucha contra el narcotrafico." The military, too, uses these terms, rather than "war" (guerra).

But as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words: if it's just a struggle, or fight, then why has Calderon donned military garb on more than one occasion? Why has he so often been pictured alongside the military when surveying what can only be described as battlefields?

Some experts argue that it can't be a war because the end result won't bring about a clear winner or loser. "With a war, you either win or lose. And with this one, how are we going to win it?" asks security analyst Jorge Chabat in the McClatchy piece.

But he's not exactly right in this argument, in my opinion. After all, war isn't as black and white as that. In Iraq and Afghanistan, which surely must be defined as wars, there is no clear winner or loser. There are multiple elements to these wars – invasion, regime overthrow, counterinsurgency, reconstruction, peacekeeping, and so on – that take time, prompt the evolution of strategies, and often don't produce clear and tangible results immediately. There are other players in the game, too, who cannot be considered the enemy in a conventional sense. The same goes for Mexico's lucha against the drug cartels and organized crime.

Standard definitions of war boil it down to a state of armed conflict between different nations/states or different groups within a nation/state.

Some 50,000 Mexican soldiers are currently using force to fight some extremely well-armed drug trafficking organizations. I think this is a war, personally.

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About Me

I'm a 39-year-old freelance journalist/author, until recently based in Mexico City. I've written for Newsweek (with whom I was an editor from 2000 to 2007) Slate.com, Foreign Policy, Jane's Intelligence Weekly, FDI magazine, the Sunday Times, World Politics Review, Soldier of Fortune, The News (Mexico City), The Sun, Nogales International and the Haitian Times. I've written two books on Mexico's drug war, "The Last Narco," published September 2010, and "Hasta El Ultimo Dia," published in March 2012. I hold a Master's Degree in War Studies from the University of Glasgow.
I have provided commentary on the drug war for CNN, NPR, the BBC, The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, AOL News, CTV (Canada), Xinhua, El Universal and Reforma (Mexico) and several other publications and major news outlets.
I can be reached for requests for commentary/talks on the Mexican drug war at mbeithpublic@gmail.com
The photos and opinions on this site are my own, unless otherwise specified.